by Jo Nesbo
“Mm. Do you think there’s anything to see here?” he asked, taking the coffee mug.
“No.”
“So why did you bring the photos home?”
“Because ninety-five percent of all police work is searching in the wrong place.”
She had just quoted Harry’s Third Commandment.
“And you have to learn to enjoy the ninety-five percent, too. Otherwise you’ll go mad.”
Fourth Commandment.
“And the reports?” Harry asked.
“All we have are the reports on the murders of Borgny and Charlotte, and there’s nothing in them. No forensic leads, no accounts of unusual activities. No rip-offs about bitter enemies, jealous lovers, greedy heirs, deranged stalkers, impatient drug dealers or other creditors. In short—”
“No leads, no apparent motives, no murder weapons. I would have liked to start interviewing people in the Marit Olsen case, but, as you know, we’re not working on it.”
Kaja smiled. “Of course not. By the way, I spoke to a political journalist from VG today. He said none of the journalists at Stortinget knew anything about Marit Olsen being depressed or having personal crises or suicidal thoughts. Or enemies, in her professional or her private life.”
“Mm.”
Harry skimmed the row of spectators’ faces. A woman with sleepwalker eyes and a child on her arm.
“What do these people want?” Behind them: the back of a man leaving. Down jacket, woolen hat. “To be shocked. Shaken. Entertained. Purified …”
“Incredible.”
“Mm. And so you’re reading John Fante. You like older things, do you?” He nodded toward the room, the house. And he meant the room, the house. But reckoned she would drop in a comment about the husband if he was a lot older than her, as Harry guessed he was.
She looked at him with enthusiasm. “Have you read Fante?”
“When I was young and was going through my Bukowski period I read one whose title eludes me. I bought them mostly because Charles Bukowski was an ardent fan.” He made a show of checking his watch. “Whoops, time to go home.”
Kaja looked at him in amazement and then at the untouched cup of coffee.
“Jet lag.” Harry smiled, getting to his feet. “We can talk tomorrow at the meeting.”
“Of course.”
Harry patted his trouser pocket. “By the way, I’ve run out of cigarettes. The tax-free Camel cigarettes you took through customs for me …”
“Just a minute.” She smiled.
When she came back with the carton, Harry was standing in the hall, with his jacket and boots already on.
“Thank you,” he said, taking out one of the packs and opening it.
When he was outside on the steps, she leaned against the door frame. “Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but I have a feeling that this was some kind of test.”
“Test?” Harry said, lighting a cigarette.
“I won’t ask what the test was for, but did I pass?”
Harry chuckled. “It was just this.” He walked down the steps waving the carton. “Oh-seven-hundred hours.”
Harry let himself into his flat. Pressed the light switch and established that the electricity had not been disconnected. Took off his coat, went into the sitting room, put on Deep Purple, his favorite band in the category of can’t-help-being-funny-but-brilliant-anyway. “Speed King.” Ian Paice on drums. He sat down on the sofa and pressed his fingertips against his forehead. The dogs were yanking at the chains. Howling, snarling, barking, their teeth tearing at his innards. If he let them loose, there would be no way back. Not this time. Before, there had always been good enough reasons to stop drinking again. Rakel, Oleg, the job, perhaps even Dad. He didn’t have any of them anymore. It couldn’t happen. Not with alcohol. So he had to have an alternative intoxicant. He could control intoxication. Thank you, Kaja. Was he ashamed? Of course he was. But pride was a luxury he couldn’t always afford.
He took the bottom pack out of the carton. You could hardly see that the seal on the pack had been broken. It was a fact that women like Kaja were never checked at customs. He opened the pack and pulled out the tinfoil. Unfolded it and looked at the brown ball. Inhaled the sweet smell.
Then he set about his preparations.
Harry had seen all possible ways of smoking opium, everything from the complicated, ritual procedures of opium dens, which were nothing less than Chinese tea ceremonies, through all sorts of pipe arrangements to the simplest: lighting the ball, placing a straw over it and inhaling for all you were worth as the goods literally went up in smoke. Whatever method you chose, the principle was the same: to get the substances—morphine, thebaine, codeine and a whole bouquet of other chemical friends—into your bloodstream. Harry’s method was straightforward. He taped a steel spoon to the end of the table, placed a tiny particle of the lump, no bigger than the head of a matchstick, in the spoon and heated it with a lighter. When the opium began to burn he held an ordinary glass over it to collect the smoke. Then he put a drinking straw, one with a flexible joint, in the glass and inhaled. Harry noted that his fingers worked without a hint of a tremble. In Hong Kong he had regularly kept a check on his dependency level; seen in that light, he was the most disciplined drug abuser he knew. He could predetermine his dose of alcohol and stop there, however plastered he was. In Hong Kong he had cut out opium for a week or two and taken only a couple of analgesic tablets, which would not have prevented withdrawal symptoms anyway, but which perhaps had a psychological effect since he knew they contained a tiny amount of morphine. He was not hooked. On drugs in general he was, but on opium in particular: no. Though it was a sliding scale, of course. Because while he was taping the spoon into position he could already feel the dogs calming down. For they knew now, knew they would soon be fed.
And could be at peace. Until the next time.
The burning hot lighter was already scorching Harry’s fingers. On the table were the straws from McDonald’s.
A minute later he had taken the first drag.
The effect was immediate. The pains, even those he didn’t know he had, vanished. The associations, the images, appeared. He would be able to sleep tonight.
Bjørn Holm couldn’t sleep.
He had tried reading Escott’s Hank Williams: The Biography, about the country legend’s short life and long death, listening to a bootleg Lucinda Williams CD of a concert in Austin, and counting Texas long-horns, but to no avail.
A dilemma. That’s exactly what it was. A problem without a proper solution. Forensics Officer Holm hated that type of problem.
He huddled up on the slightly too short sofa bed that had been among the goods he’d brought from Skreia, along with his vinyl collection of Elvis, the Sex Pistols, Jason & the Scorchers, three hand-sewn suits from Nashville, an American Bible and a dining-room suite that had survived three generations of Holms. But he couldn’t concentrate.
The dilemma was that he had made an interesting discovery while examining the rope with which Marit Olsen had been hanged—or to be more precise, beheaded. It wasn’t a clue that would necessarily produce anything, but nonetheless the dilemma remained the same: Would it be right to pass the information on to Kripos or to Harry? Bjørn Holm had identified the tiny shells on the rope during the time he was still working for Kripos, when he was talking to a freshwater biologist at the Biological Institute, University of Oslo. But then Beate Lønn had transferred him to Harry’s unit before the report had been written, and, sitting down at the computer tomorrow to write it, he would in fact be reporting to Harry.
OK, technically perhaps it wasn’t a dilemma; the information belonged to Kripos. Giving it to anyone else would be regarded as a dereliction of duty. And what did he owe Harry Hole, actually? Hole had never given him anything but aggravation. He was quirky and inconsiderate at work. Positively dangerous when drinking. But on the level when sober. You could rely on him turning up, and there would be no bullshit and no “You owe me.” An irksome enemy, but a
good friend. A good man. A damn good man. A bit like Hank, in fact.
Bjørn Holm groaned and rolled over to face the wall.
Stine woke with a start.
In the dark she heard a grinding sound. She rolled onto her side. The ceiling was dimly lit; the light came from the floor beside the bed. What was the time? Three o’clock in the morning? She stretched and grabbed her cell phone.
“Yes?” she said with a voice that made her seem more sleepy than she was.
“After the delta I was sick of snakes and mosquitoes, and me and the motorbike headed north along the Burmese coast to Arakan.”
She recognized the voice right away.
“To the island of Sai Chung,” he said. “There’s an active mud volcano I heard was about to explode. And on the third night I was there, it erupted. I thought there would just be mud, but, you know, it spewed good old-fashioned lava as well. Thick lava that flowed so slowly through the town that we could blithely walk away from it.”
“It’s the middle of the night.” She yawned.
“Yet still it wouldn’t stop. Apparently they call it cold lava when it’s so sticky, but it consumed everything in its path. Trees with fresh green leaves were like Christmas trees for four seconds until they were turned to ashes and were gone. The Burmese tried to escape in cars loaded with their stuff, but they had spent too much time packing. The lava was moving that fast, after all! When they’d emerge from their house with the TV set, the lava would already be up to their walls. They threw themselves inside their cars, but the heat punctured the tires. Then the gasoline caught fire and they clambered out like human torches. Do you remember my name?”
“Listen, Elias—”
“I said you would remember.”
“I have to sleep. I’ve got classes tomorrow.”
“I am such an eruption, Stine. I’m cold lava. I move slowly, but I’m unstoppable. I’m coming to where you are.”
She tried to remember if she had told him her name. And automatically directed her gaze to the window. It was open. Outside, the wind soughed, peaceful, reassuring.
His voice was low, a whisper. “I saw a dog entangled in barbed wire, trying to flee. It was in the path of the lava. But then the stream veered left, passed right by. A merciful God, I supposed. But the lava brushed against it. Half the dog simply vanished, evaporated. Before the rest burned up. So it was ashes, too. Everything turns to ashes.”
“Yuck—I’m hanging up.”
“Look outside. Look, I’m already up against the house.”
“Stop it!”
“Relax—I’m only teasing.” His loud laughter pealed in her ears.
Stine shuddered. He must be drunk. Or crazy. Or both.
“Sleep tight, Stine. See you soon.”
He broke the connection. Stine stared at the phone. Then she switched it off and threw it to the foot of her bed. Cursed because she already knew. She would get no more sleep that night.
17
Fibers
It was 6:58. Harry Hole, Kaja Solness and Bjørn Holm were walking through the culvert, a three-hundred-yard-long subterranean corridor connecting Police HQ and Oslo District Prison. Now and then it was used to transport prisoners to Police HQ for questioning, sometimes for sports training sessions in the winter and in the bad old days for extremely unofficial beatings of particularly intractable prisoners.
Water from the ceiling dripped onto the concrete with wet kisses that echoed down the dimly lit corridor.
“Here,” Harry said as they reached the end.
“Here?” asked Bjørn Holm.
They had to bend their heads to pass under the stairs leading to the prison cells. Harry turned the key in the lock and opened the iron door. The musty smell of heated, dank air hit him.
He pressed the light switch. Cold blue light from fluorescent tubes enveloped a square concrete room with gray-blue linoleum on the floor and nothing on the walls.
The room had no windows, no radiators, none of the facilities you expect in a space supposed to function as an office for three people, apart from desks with chairs and a computer each. On the floor there was a coffee machine stained brown and a water cooler.
“The boilers heating the whole prison are in the adjacent room,” Harry said. “That’s why it’s so hot in here.”
“Basically not very homey,” Kaja said, sitting at one of the desks.
“Right—sort of reminiscent of hell,” Holm said, pulling off his suede jacket and undoing one shirt button. “Is there cell coverage here?”
“Just about,” Harry said. “And an Internet connection. We have everything we need.”
“Apart from coffee cups,” Holm said.
Harry shook his head. From his jacket pocket he produced three white cups, and he placed one on each of the three desks. Then he pulled a bag of coffee from his inside pocket and went over to the machine.
“You’ve taken them from the cafeteria,” Bjørn said, raising the cup Harry had put down in front of him. “ ‘Hank Williams’?”
“Written with a felt pen, so be careful,” Harry said, tearing open the coffee pouch with his teeth.
“ ‘John Fante’?” Kaja read on her cup. “What do you have?”
“For the time being, nothing,” Harry said.
“And why not?”
“Because it will be the name of our main suspect of the moment.”
Neither of the other two said anything. The coffee machine slurped up the water.
“I want three names on the table by the time this is ready,” Harry said.
They were done with their second cup of coffee and into the sixth theory when Harry interrupted the session.
“OK, that was the warm-up, just to get the gray matter working.”
Kaja had just launched the idea that the murders were sexually motivated and that the killer was an ex-con with a record for similar crimes who knew that the police had his DNA and therefore did not spill his seed on the ground, but masturbated into a bag or some such receptacle before leaving the scene. Accordingly, she said, they should start going through criminal records and talking to staff in the Sexual Offenses Unit.
“But don’t you believe we’re onto something?” she said.
“I don’t believe anything,” Harry answered. “I’m trying to keep my brain clear and receptive.”
“But you must believe something?”
“Yes, I do. I believe the three murders have been carried out by the same person or persons. And I believe it’s possible to find a connection that in turn might lead us to a motive that in turn—if we’re very, very lucky—will lead us to the guilty party or parties.”
“ ‘Very, very lucky.’ You make it sound as if the odds are not good.”
“Well.” Harry leaned back on his chair with his hands behind his head. “Several yards of books have been written about what characterizes serial killers. In films, the police call in a psychologist who, after reading a couple of reports, gives them a profile that invariably fits. People believe that Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is an accurate depiction. But in reality serial killers are, sad to say, as different from one another as everyone else. There is only one thing that distinguishes them from other criminals.”
“And that is …?”
“They don’t get caught.”
Bjørn Holm laughed, realized it was inappropriate and shut up.
“That’s not true, is it?” Kaja said. “What about …?”
“You’re thinking of the cases where a pattern emerged and they caught the person. But don’t forget all the unsolved murders we still think are one-offs, where a connection was never found. Thousands.”
Kaja glanced at Bjørn, who was nodding meaningfully.
“You believe in connections?” she said.
“Yep,” Harry said. “And we have to find one without going down the path of interviewing people, which might give us away.”
“So?”
“When we predicted potential threats in
the Security Service we did nothing but look for possible connections, without talking to a living soul. We had a NATO-built search engine long before anyone had heard of Yahoo or Google. With it we could sneak in anywhere and scan practically everything with any connection to the Net. That’s what we have to do here as well.” He glanced at his watch. “And that’s why in one and a half hours I’ll be sitting on a plane to Bergen. And in three hours I’ll be talking to an unemployed colleague who I hope can help us. So let’s finish up here, shall we? Kaja and I have talked quite a bit, Bjørn. What do you have?”
Bjørn Holm jerked in his chair, as if roused from sleep.
“Me? Er … not much, I’m afraid.”
Harry rubbed his jaw carefully. “You’ve got something.”
“Nope. Neither Forensics nor the detectives on the case have got so much as a lump of fly shit. Not in the Marit Olsen case, nor in either of the other two.”
“Two months,” Harry said. “Come on.”
“I can give you a summary,” said Bjørn Holm. “For two months we have analyzed, x-rayed and stared ourselves stupid at photos, blood samples, strands of hair, nails, all sorts. We’ve gone through twenty-four theories of how and why he’s stabbed twenty-four holes in the mouths of the first two victims in such a way that all the wounds point inward to the same central point. With no result. Marit Olsen also had wounds to the mouth, but they were inflicted with a knife and were sloppy, brutal. In short: nada.”
“What about those small stones in the cellar where Borgny was found?”
“Analyzed. Lots of iron and magnesium, some aluminum and silica. So-called basalt rock. Porous and black. Any the wiser?”
“Both Borgny and Charlotte had iron and coltan on the insides of their molars. What does that tell us?”
“That they were killed with the same goddamn instrument, but that doesn’t get us any closer to what it was.”
Silence.
Harry coughed. “OK, Bjørn, out with it.”
“Out with what?”
